Creation or
Evolution?Part II-The Historical Record
The Men Of Science Who
Believed In Creation
The Men Of Science
Who Believed In CreationThe idea that "creation halts human in-
quiry," that a picture of reality starting off
with God "finishes off any ideas of research,"
is a modern fiction. Once again, life-sciences
have many Christian researchers like those in
the past, such as Linnaeus, the great Swedish
botanist, and his predecessor John Ray (whose
book The Wisdom of God Manifested in
the Works of Creation blocked evolutionary
thought in science for 200 years). History is
filled with the genius of men like Kepler,
Galileo, Bacon, the brilliant Isaac Newtons, Pas-
cals and Leibnitzs, who (despite the strange si-
lence on this aspect of their lives from the
secular researcher) all outspokenly and un-
ashamedly loved God and studied His world
with joy. Darwin's time was no exception.1Faraday's Electricity In 1831, when Darwin was a backslidden, 22-
year-old ministerial student starting out his
five-year voyage on the "Beagle," Michael
Faraday, then 40, began a
series of experiments that
demonstrated the principle
of electromagnetic in-
duction. "Very few
men," said Sir William
Bragg, "have changed
the face of the
world as Fara-
day has done.
He was
one of the
greatest
[drawing of]
Michael Faraday
1) R.E.D. Clark: Creator God or Cosmic Magician? Symposium on Crea-
tion, vol. IV, pp. 117-118; Peter Masters: Men of Purpose, pp. 9-20, 93-
101, 114-121.
experimental philosophers that ever appeared in this
country or indeed in all the world. The whole world of
electricity started with a simple experiment carried out in
the Royal Institute by one of the greatest scientists of all
time." Born the year John Wesley died (1791), at 44 recog-
nized as the leading man of science and honored with a
doctorate by Oxford University, he became an elder at 50
in the Chapel Meeting House in Pauls Alley, London,
preaching there every Sunday, often to fellow scientists.
Near his death in 1867, and holding no less than 97 un-
sought distinctions from international academies of sci-
ence, he said, "My worldly faculties are slipping away day
by day. Happy it is for all of us that the true good does not
lie in them. As they ebb, may they leave us as little chil-
dren trusting in the Father of Mercies and accepting His
unspeakable gift. I bow before Him who is Lord of all."
Significantly, the principal men to follow him in construct-
ing the electrical age all owned the same Christ as their
Lord--Lord Kelvin (William Thomson), Clerk Maxwell,
and Sir John Ambrose Fleming.Lord Kelvin's Second Law The Absolute Temperature Scale still bears Lord Kel-
vin's name, but other exploits in his day, like the sub-
marine cable, revolutionary ships compass and 69 other
patented brainwaves, made him a household word.
He died in 1907 with over 600 published scientific pa-
pers to his credit, 70 patented invention and 21 hon-
orary degrees. Elected unanimously at 22 as Glasgow
University's youngest professor ever, he opened
every lecture with prayer. "A firm believer in creation
for his entire life . . . he often insisted that the power
to analyze, to look for causes, was itself a creation of
God. He never ceased to look for causes, causes of
causes, and for causes for these in return. Seeking a
cause for the escape of heat from the Earth, he be-
came in the end a founder of geophysics and the joint
discoverer of the Second Law of Thermodynamics."
He was 35 in 1859, when Darwin published his "Ori-
gin of the Species."
Could he have dreamed then that the Law he
help co-discover would today be one of the biggest
headaches to Darwin's theory? "The sheer venture-
someness of Kelvin's speculations were possible only
because of his underlying certainty that behind every-
thing lay the power of the Creator God. Science, in
his view, could never lead a man to disbelieve in
God." Kelvin wouldn't buy today's common object-
ion that creation is somehow "unscientific." When
his sister in later years read to him Darwin's early
statement of "disbelief in Divine revelation and evi-
dence of creative design in the
Universe," Lord Kelvin "un-
hesitatingly denounced it as
utterly unscientific."
Darwin apparently pub-
lished his theory with
much apprehension, fear-
ing the scorn of fellow sci-
entists; in the first edition
of his "Origin," he pre-
pared a line of retreat
along Lamark's ideas in
case his theory of nat-
ural selection was found
indefensible.2 Professor
C. D. Darlington was of
the opinion that Dar-
winism began "as a
theory that could be [drawing of]
explained by natural Lord Kelvin
selection; it ended as a theory that evolution could be
explained just as you would like it to explained."3John Fleming's "Value" John Ambrose Fleming (inventor of the vacuum
tube), was 11 when Darwin published "The Origin."
Charles Williams' YMCA and William Booth of the
soon-to-be-founded Salvation Army, had both been
ministering in England 15 years; John's father was a
pastor. A great spiritual awakening took place that
year with many people in his father's church becom-
ing Christians. Although his early life was financially
difficult, John grew up to contribute some of the
greatest discoveries of his day in physics and electri-
cal engineering. "Busy though he was at scientific af-
fairs, he had another loyalty to the Friend he had
found as a young man. He began to be less quiet as a
Christian believer and to use his remarkable powers
as a lecturer in speaking about the Bible. He loved the
Bible and studied it as the Word of God. 'It contains,'
he said, 'the record of events quite out of line with
normal human experience and predictions--some of
which have already been remarkably fulfilled . . . it is,
2) Life & Letters of Charles Darwin--Ed. Francis Darwin, D. Appleton & Company,
1888, vol. 2, pp. 12-15.
3) Darlington: "The Origin of Darwinism," Scientific American, 200, 5:60; May 1959,
pp. 60-61.
and always has been, revered as the commu-
nication to us from the Creator of the Uni-
verse, the Supreme and Everlasting God.'"
Few other men could equal his skill in com-
pletely enthralling an audience. He was a bril-
liant speaker, getting popular scientific lec-
tures across to non-scientific audiences;
copies of his published works kept in Univer-
sity College fill five volumes. He was an out-
spoken opponent of Evolution theory, and
could not bear to look on quitely while an "un-
proven and unscientific theory was blatantly
taught as fact to the ordinary public." From
1904, under the title Evidence Of Things Not
Seen, he lectured on the unadorned facts
about Evolution.
When J. W. Swan of Newcastle made a carbon-
filament lamp, it was further improved by Edison,
who appointed Fleming to be his chief electri-
cian. Fleming was later also called in by Marconi
to help get his wireless telegraph to work; prog-
ress was held up without an essential technology
that Fleming finally designed in 1904--the
"valve" as he called it, or the vacuum tube.Son Of Darwin Meets Multiprocessor
(A Science-Fact Horror-Movie
For An Old Theory)Darwin had been dead 33 years. He had no
idea that his ideas could ever be practically
tested. Charles Babbage's "analytical engine"
had failed to get off the ground 70 years be-
fore, awaiting the very technology that Flem-
ing launched. It was left to John Mauchly and J.
Presper Eckert in 1946 to build the first nail for
the coffin of Darwin's time-protected theory
in ENIAC, a clanking, hard-wired monstrosity
weighing 30 tons that used 19,000 of these vac-
uum-tubes, prototypes of the modern micro-
chip.
Some of us forget how long ago Darwin lived.
Born the same year Abe Lincoln (1809), nine
years after Volta re-invented the electric bat-
tery, it would have really blown his circuits to
see a home micro-computer, let alone to run a
CRAY-1 or a S1 Mark IIA Multiprocessor with
the capacity of eight BILLION operations a sec-
ond. In Darwin's day, the great salvation of his
theory was that no one could live long enough
to disprove it. For over a century the standard
argument ran like this: "Just because you can't
see it working today doesn't mean it didn't;
you haven't looked long enough, so there!
Given enough time and chance, anything can
happen--and probably did."
Enter digital logic, integrated circuitry, the
programmable computer: and with it a whole
new ball game. You see it is now possible to
duplicate millions of years and billions of ran-
dom variations, simulate original conditions,
accelerate any possible spontaneous pro-
cess--to practically shrink awesome numbers
into time slots of months, weeks, sometimes
days or hours. Darwin's theory can be tested,
today, NOW.
And it has been. With embarrassing results.
Put simply, it doesn't work. Put bluntly, nothing
else outside of INTELLIGENT DIRECTED CON-
TROL does anything more than jam test pro-
grams into chaos. This has led to interesting
shouting matches between cyberneticists
(those who ran the tests on the computers), and
the neo-Darwinists, and some mad scrambles
for some exotic new catalyst or concept to ac-
count for the disappointing facts. Leave a system
to itself and all you have at the end of a long
time is a bigger mess than you started with. And
new discoveries on the complexity of molecules
and the conditions necessary to create them
only seem to make the problem worse.4The Master-Law Of Nature-- Entropy Remember Lord Kelvin and his co-discovery
of the Second Law of Thermodynamics?
The Second Law defines that all things run
down, not up. Complex things break down; life
becomes more disorganized (look at your desk
or bed.) Time and Chance make things WORSE,
not better. A field, a room, a person, left alone
and unattended, falls apart. "Entropy,"5 says
Jeremy Rifkin, in applying the law in his radical
book to both economics and politics, "is the
4) Mathematical Challenges to the Neo-Darwinian Interpretation of Evolu-
tion--Ed. Moorhead & Kaplan, Philadelphia: Wistar Institute, 1967; Murray
Eden: Inadequacies of Neo-Darwinian Evolution as a Scientific Theory, p.
11; M.P. Shutzenberger, pp. 73-75; A.E. Wilder-Smith: The Creation of
Life--A Cybernetic Approach to Evolution, Baker; James F. Coppedge:
Evolution--Possible or Impossible?[,] Zondervan, 1973.
5) The tendency of an energy system to run down--Webster's New World
Dictionary.
universal master-law, an unbroken reality writ-
ten all around you."
When you think about it, there are only two
basic ways to get order out of disorder:
(1) Chance and Time. These two factors form
one alternative. Say we start with these, nothing
and no one else. Does it help? Not a lot. A
chance garden is called a jungle. Time passing
make things fall apart, not fall together. Both
only tend to make things worse, so that really
seems to rule them both out.
(2) An Agent and a degradable Energy supply.
That is to say: Someone deliberately acting on
the disorder with the power to use in fixing it
up. Of course, the Agent must pre-exist the sys-
tem, and must be at least as complex as the
order you want in the system.
Putting all this more simply, if you want to
dig ditches, you have to BE THERE first--with the
energy and the tools to do it. You also have to
be smarter than the ditch!
Refrigerators make water (less complex) into
ice (more complex) because an AGENT of
GREATER WISDOM than the ice-blocks (Frig-
idaire design team?) put together a MACHINE
(on special at Sears) that uses DEGRADABLE EN-
ERGY (your astonishing power bill!). The "ran-
domness" was transferred out of the water into
heating air behind your fridge, and you finally
got something to put into your lemonade--pay-
ing only for a fridge, electricity, sales tax and
commission, and your service contract when
the whole thing succumbs to the Second Law
again on Tuesday and breaks down.
That is why some have made an open chal-
lenge for anyone to prove that MACRO-evolu-
tion is scientifically possible. Like R.G. Elmen-
dorf, who offers a $5,000 cash reward for any-
one who can find a natural process in which
available energy, structure and information IN-
CREASE with time--WITHOUT requiring PRIOR
and HIGHER energy, structure and information:
"Evolution is here defined as a real, natural,
self-caused, continuing, uphill process--involv-
ing energy, structure and information--which
goes from disorganized to organized, from ran-
dom to ordered, from lower to higher, from
simple to complex, from atom to amoeba,
from molecules to man. All uphill processes
(photosynthesis, growth, etc.) are local and tem-
porary, and all require a creative trio
of prerequisites in order to operate:
(1) ENERGY--an appropriate outside
source of energy.
(2) ENERGY CONVERSION MACHINE
--a fit structure or mechanism to use
and transform the above energy.
(3) INTELLIGENCE--an intelligent in-
formation and control system to direct
the machine (found only in life)."6Are YOU "Breaking Down"? Do not put off getting right with
God. Do not say to yourself, "Give me
time and I'll be okay." Entropy con-
tradicts you. Time will never make you
better; time only INCREASES disorder.
Are you going to take the awful
chance that you are right and the
Word of God is wrong? Some things
are not a gamble, but they are suicide.
The testimony of the Universe is
against you. Chance offers no safety.
Her deck is stacked in favor of the
house. All that can bring order out of
disorder is greater Power and higher In-
telligence. Such is the Second Law--in
physics or in life.
6) R.G.: Elmendorf--"$5,000 Reward," September 1, 1976;
Bible-Science Association Western Penn., Bairdford, PA 15006.
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